Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel eBook

CHAPTER III.

THE BRIDGE.

THE deep-sea soundings, made of late years in the
Atlantic, reveal the fact that the Azores are the
mountaintops of a colossal mass of sunken land; and
that from this center one great ridge runs southward
for some distance, and then, bifurcating, sends out
one limb to the shores of Africa, and another to the
shores of South America; while there are the evidences
that a third great ridge formerly reached northward
from the Azores to the British Islands.

When these ridges—­really the tops of long
and continuous mountain-chains, like the Andes or
the Rocky Mountains, the backbone of a vast primeval
Atlantic-filling, but, even then, in great part, sunken
continent, were above the water, they furnished a wonderful
feature in the scenery and geography of the world;
they were the pathways over which the migrations of
races extended in the ancient days; they wound for
thousands of miles, irregular, rocky, wave-washed,
through the great ocean, here expanding into islands,
there reduced to a narrow strip, or sinking into the
sea; they reached from a central civilized land—­an
ancient, long-settled land, the land of the godlike
race—­to its colonies, or connections, north,
south, east, and west; and they impressed themselves
vividly on the imagination and the traditions of mankind,
leaving their image even in the religions of the world
unto this day.

As, in process of time, they gradually or suddenly
settled

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into the deep, they must at first have formed long,
continuous strings of islands, almost touching each
other, resembling very much the Aleutian Archipelago,
or the Bahama group; and these islands continued to
be used, during later ages, as the stepping-stones
for migrations and intercourse between the old and
the new worlds, just as the discovery of the Azores
helped forward the discovery of the New World by Columbus;
he used them, we know, as a halting-place in his great
voyage.

When Job speaks of “the island of the innocent,”
which was spared from utter destruction, he prefaces
it by asking, (chap. xxii):

“15. Hast thou marked the old way
which wicked men have trodden?

“16. Which were (was?) cut down out of
time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood.”

And in chapter xxviii, verse 4, we have what may be
another allusion to this “way,” along
which go the people who are on their journey, and
which “divideth the flood,” and on which
some are escaping.

The Quiche manuscript, as translated by the Abbé Brasseur
de Bourbourg,[1] gives an account of the migration
of the Quiche race to America from some eastern land
in a very early day, in “the day of darkness,”
ere the sun was, in the so-called glacial age.

When they moved to America they wandered for a long
time through forests and over mountains, and “they
had a long passage to make, through the sea, along
the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand.”
And this long passage was through the sea “which
was parted for their passage.” That is,
the sea was on both sides of this long ridge of rocks
and sand.